Time keeping on Suse Novell Linux 11 running under Vmware Vsphere

If you are running Novell SLES 11 (32 or 64 bit) OS on Vmware Vsphere platform I have some good news for you. Keeping system time on this platform is very easy as long as you have an external NTP server. Below I have listed necessary configuration steps to perform on SLES 11 for best system time keeping.

Please note that this guide will also apply for SLES 11 installed on a dedicated hardware just skip the Vmware specific configuration.

Disable Vmware Tools time synchronization with the Host under “Edit settings” for the specific virtual machine. This requires virtual machine to be shutdown unless you are using default settings (Time Synchronization with Host is off by default).

No additional kernel parameters are required for SLES 11 running under Vmware Vsphere platform. This applies for both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems.

SLES 11 OS NTP configuration (please note that this applies to most of other Linux operating systems as well):

Login with root and check if you have ntp daemon running by running the following command:

ps -aux|grep ntp

You may want to check if you have NTP installed by running the following RPM command:

rpm -aq|grep ntp

If you have NTP RPM installed, but it is not running check with the following command:

chkconfig ntp

It should list on if it shows off, then issue the following command:

chkconfig ntp on

and issue command to start NTP right now:

service ntp start

Now it’s time to configure NTP servers. All NTP config goes into /etc/ntp.conf file. We need to find there line “Server 127.0.0.1” and add your internal NTP servers or public ones if you can query outside boxes (no corporate firewalls/acl’s in place and filtering NTP packets). The config example for NTP server records can be something like this: